


The Top Five Job

by BlueStreak



Category: Leverage
Genre: Alcohol, Backstory, Crimes & Criminals, Gen, History Jokes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-21
Updated: 2015-07-21
Packaged: 2018-04-10 10:49:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,555
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4388888
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BlueStreak/pseuds/BlueStreak
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A goofy little vignette in which the team discusses the classic criminals they most admire.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Top Five Job

[[This episode takes place immediately after “The Boiler Room Job” in season 4]]

Greg Sherman had been put away, his smug smirk and inevitable full-Windsor tie with him, and afterward it was back to McRory's for drinks as usual. This time, though, that godawful little shit Sherman had gotten under everyone's skin just a bit.

"On and on and freakin' _on_ about his daddy and his granddaddy and the Yellow damn Kid and I don't know what," Hardison observed over the neck of a beer bottle. "Like anyone even cares."

"Well now, be fair," Sophie said, her second vodka dangling carelessly from one hand. "If his grandfather really was Joseph Weil, he wasn't lying about him inventing the Big Store. That's a classic."

"He had to be lying, though,” Eliot put in. “Or if he didn't lie, his father lied to him. It's just one of those things, you pick someone you wish you could be like." Eliot was still keyed up, having only gotten to beat the living hell out of one person in the past two weeks, and he was drowning the rougher edges in a series of beers with macho names.

Everyone nodded respectfully. "Yeah, too true, too true," Hardison said, inclining his bottle toward Eliot. "I had a guy like that when I was coming up, y'all'd never guess who."

"Mitnick," suggested Eliot.

"The Legion of Doom," proposed Nate.

"Legion of… seriously? Mitnick? Do y'all even _know_ what I do?"

"Aren't the Legion of Doom from a cartoon?" Parker interjected, looking puzzled.

"Nah, they were… I mean, yes they were from a cartoon, but…." Hardison groped around for the interface between reality, fiction, reality referencing fiction, and Parker's private reality. "It's not important because they were small-time and I never wanted to be their second-rate selves. Nah, the _real_ original hacker was that crazy bastard James Reavis."

Everyone stared blankly for a second before Nate spoke. "The James Reavis who died in, what, 1914?"

"The very same. Man was O.G. before O.G. was even a thing." Hardison, for once, grinned widely at the fact that nobody got his reference.

"Dammit, Hardison, what… no." Eliot thought better of himself. "Nate, what the hell is Hardison talking about?"

"James Reavis committed the most ambitious and successful fraud of the 19th century," Nate said, pouring himself another glass of Jameson. "He actually managed to steal the state of Arizona."

The ensuing awkward pause ended when Sophie blurted, "Okay, is this like when you say 'Let's go steal a something or other' and what you mean is--"

"What he _means_ ," Hardison interrupted, "is that James Reavis was the legal owner of Arizona. For _years_. As in charging rent on every property owner in the state for the land they thought they owned. As in millions of dollars of legal income back when a million _meant_ something, you feel me?"

"Millions?" Parker asked, interested now. "How did he do that?"

"Hacking," Hardison shrugged. "He saw an exploit in the system, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, where the U.S. government agreed to honor land grants made by the Spanish monarchy back in the day. Then he hacked the existing data with a bunch of false records proving that he was a guy named Baron Peralta, who had a claim on Arizona that dated back centuries, and which was backed up by church records and legal archives and every damn thing. He forged the documents, put them where people expected to find them, filed his claim, and boom. Stole Arizona. Classic hack."

Sophie raised her third vodka in salute. "That's what I'm always saying, you have to respect the classics. For me, it was Cassie Chadwick."

Nate snorted into his whiskey, but everyone else looked blank. With a roll of her eyes that would have been visible from the back row of a theater, Sophie continued. "Probably back when your Mr. Reavis was stealing Arizona, Cassie persuaded all of Cleveland that she was the illegitimate daughter of Andrew Carnegie… you've heard of _him_ , I hope? Well, word got around that she was due to inherit his entire fortune, but of course everyone who heard that was told it in the _very strictest confidence_ , so nobody could check it. She ran up lines of credit at the best stores in town, got bank loans just by asking for them, because everyone knew she was going to be the richest woman in the world, but nobody could check her story. She'd have gotten away clean if she'd known when to take the money and walk away."

Everyone chuckled and raised a glass to that sentiment.

"How about you?" Nate asked Eliot, not unkindly. "What are a hitter's influences? I know you're not going to say Dasher Abbandando…”

Eliot sneered. “Petty thug who thought he was smart. I dunno, though. I mean, I never meant to end up doing… you know, a lot of what I've done. I could lie and say I wanted to be Audie Murphy, but I'm not gonna lie to you guys. I guess… I guess if I had to pick a guy who, you know, kept me going when I wanted to quit, it'd be Huo Yuanjia."

Hardison grinned and inclined his beer respectfully, but everyone else looked blank. Eliot continued before anyone needed to ask. "He was a martial artist, but more than that, he was a patriot. He fought his country's enemies, and that was something I could relate to when I was younger. Also, he moved past just fighting to build something better, something positive, and I wanted that for myself. Mainly, though, it was… you know the reason Huo Yuanjia started practicing martial arts?" Everyone shrugged, and Eliot continued, almost keeping the snarl out of his voice. "Because someone told him he couldn't."

Sophie grinned and raised the last of the third vodka. "Damn good reason," she said, as Eliot and Hardison bumped fists over the table.

"Can I tell mine now?" Parker said excitedly.

"Are you going to say Archie?" Nate asked, "because listing Archie as an influence doesn't count."

“Don’t be silly, Nate. My guess is Charlie Peace,” suggested Sophie.

Hardison shook his head. “Nah, I’m thinking Joe McGinnis, 1950. Am I right? I’m right, right?” He raised his eyebrows at Parker, then at Eliot.

Eliot put his hands up in a gesture of surrender. “I am way past pretending I understand how Parker’s brain works,” he grinned. “She wants to tell us, she’ll tell us.”

Parker sighed in exasperation. “ _Albert Spaggiari_ ,” she said as though this should have been very obvious to everyone.

Everyone looked embarrassed because that should have been very obvious to them.

“Right, 1976,” said Nate.

“The Société Générale bank,” said Sophie, her accent perfect.

“‘Without weapons, or hate, or violence,’” quoted Eliot.

“Never recaptured,” grinned Hardison.

“Twelve _million_ dollars. 1976 dollars,” Parker said happily to a napkin.

Eliot smirked. “Dove out a second-floor window, still handcuffed. You know he used to be a paratrooper, right?”

“Did you read his book?” Sophie asked. “Either of his books? They were published while he was still on the run, and nobody wanted to admit to having them, but they were so good, and then after he died when he had his body sent back to his mother so he could be buried properly… that was so sweet.”

That caused a brief pause, even from Parker.

“I feel like we just learned something about your adolescence none of us wanted to know,” Hardison said at last.

“Oh, like you’re all such closed books,” Sophie said grumpily.

That caused a longer, more awkward pause, with more glances between people suggesting they be the first to say something.

Finally, everyone looked at Nate. He looked slowly up from his glass and feigned innocence. “What?”

“It’s your turn,” Sophie said, as though to a fairly slow child.

“My turn for what?”

Sophie rolled her eyes again. “Your influences. The people you wanted to be like, that made you end up in a life of crime. And don’t say—“

“Don’t say my father?” Nate interrupted. “Or don’t say I never wanted a life of crime?”

“Let’s just say I find it interesting that those are your first two guesses,” offered Sophie, covering for the fact that she’d absolutely been about to say his father.

“I didn’t, though,” Nate said. “I wanted to be a priest. Then when I got over that, I wanted to be a detective. Wanted to do what’s right, catch the bad guys who break the rules.”

“You _do_ realize we’ve got you outnumbered here, right?” Hardison pointed out.

“I wanted to be the exact opposite of my father. I just adjusted my idea of what that would look like.” Nate was several Jamesons in.

Everyone paused awkwardly, yet again. “So,” Eliot finally ventured, “that still means he’s your biggest influence, right?”

“No, Eliot, that had completely escaped my notice, because I’m an idiot, thank you for pointing it out,” Nate suggested helpfully. “And incidentally, you can all go straight to hell.”

“Been a long time since I thought I was going anywhere else,” Eliot shrugged, raising his bottle in a salute.

“To the bad guys,” Sophie said, raising her own glass. “May we never get what’s coming to us.”

Even Nate couldn’t resist drinking to that.

**Author's Note:**

> Footnotes for the curious:
> 
> The Yellow Kid: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Weil  
> Kevin Mitnick: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_Mitnick  
> The Legion Of Doom: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legion_of_Doom_%28hacking%29  
> James Reavis: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Reavis  
> Cassie Chadwick: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassie_Chadwick  
> Dasher Abbandando: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Abbandando  
> Audie Murphy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audie_Murphy  
> Huo Yuanjia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huo_Yuanjia  
> Charlie Peace: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Peace  
> Joe McGinnis: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Brink%27s_Robbery  
> Albert Spaggiari: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Spaggiari


End file.
